Quiet Testimony

A Theory of Witnessing from Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Shari Goldberg

Description

The nineteenth century was a time of extraordinary attunement to the unspoken, the elusively present, and the subtly haunting. Quiet Testimony finds in such attunement a valuable rethinking of what it means to encounter the truth. It argues that four key writers Emerson, Douglass, Melville, and Henry James open up the domain of the witness by articulating quietude's claim on the clamoring world.

The premise of quiet testimony responds to urgent questions in critical theory and human rights. Emerson is brought into conversation with Levinas, and Douglass is considered alongside Agamben. Yet the book is steeped in the intellectual climate of the nineteenth century, in which speech and meaning might exceed the bounds of the recognized human subject. In this context, Melville's characters could read the weather, and James's could spend an evening with dead companions.

By following the path by which ostensibly unremarkable entities come to voice, Quiet Testimony suggests new configurations for ethics, politics, and the literary.

A Theory of Witnessing from Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Shari Goldberg

Reviews and Awards

"[Goldberg's] careful consideration of how Emerson, Douglass, Melville, and James think and write about testimony reveals myriad and unexpected sites of meaning. . . . Goldberg seeks to adjust not only how we read these particular writers' works but how we read in general by considering the literary text's role in teaching us to understand and respond sensitively to the extra-textual world."-The Henry James Review

"Quiet Testimony proceeds from a deceptively simple question: Who testifies in nineteenth-century America? The several answers Shari Goldberg exacts through the book's five chapters amount to a provocative reformulation of the concept of human agency, with significant ethical and political consequences."-Textual Practice

"[T]heoretically sophisticated . . . Goldberg considers how each of the writers she considers demonstrates a connection to earlier, 'enchanted' modes of confronting the natural world and the potentially permeable boundaries between the worlds of the living and the dead."-Studies in the Novel